7 Aug
2020
7 Aug
'20
1:25 a.m.
From: Will Senn
it finally clicked that it is just one (of many) bit
buckets out there
with the moniker v6. ... I am coming from a world where OS version
floppy/cd/dvd images are copies of a single master ... These tape things
could be snapshots of the systems they originate from at very different
times and with different software/sources etc.
Well, sort of. Do remember that everyone with V6 had to have a license, which
at that point you could _only_ get from Western Electric. So every
_institution_ (which is not the same as every _machine_) had had to have had
dealings with them. However, once your institution was 'in the club', stuff
just got passed around.
E.g. the BBN V6 system with TCP/IP:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=BBN-V6
I got that by driving over to BBN, and talking to Jack Haverty, and he gave us
a tape (or maybe a pack, I don't recall exactly). But we had a V6 license, so
we could do that.
But my particular machine, it worked just the way you described: we got our V6
from the other V6 machine in the Tech Sq building (RTS/DSSR), including not
only Bell post-V6 'leakage' like adb, but their local hacks (e.g. their TTY
driver, and the ttymod() system call to get to its extended features; the
ability to suspend selected applications; yadda, yadda). We never saw a V6
tape.
Noel